TSMC is reportedly getting the majority of Apple A9 orders, which would be a big coup for the company.

An Asian brokerage firm released a research note, claiming that disputes over the number of Apple A9 orders from TSMC and Samsung are “coming to an end.”

The unnamed brokerage firm said TSMC will gain more orders due to its superior yield-ramp and “manufacturing excellence in mass-production.”

This is not all, as the firm also claims TSMC managed to land orders for all Apple A9X chipsets, which will power next generation iPads. With the A9X, TSMC is expected to supply about 70 percent of all Apple A9-series chips, reports Focus Taiwan.

While Samsung managed to beat other mobile chipmakers (and TSMC), and roll out the first SoC manufactured on a FinFET node, TSMC is still in the game. The company is already churning out 16nm Kirin 930 processors for Huawei, and it’s about to get a sizable chunk of Apple’s business.

TSMC should have no trouble securing more customers for its 16FF process, which will be supplemented by the superior 16FF+ process soon. In addition, TSMC is almost certain to get a lot of business from Nvidia and AMD once their FinFET GPUs are ready.

Reuters carried a rather interesting announcement about TSMC, the maker of most SoCs and GPUs we care about.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is planning to invest $500 billion Taiwanese dollars in an advanced chip factory. This translates to a saucy $16 billion USD, but the company declined to comment on the timeframe for the investment.

Traditionally, semiconductor manufacturers like GlobalFoundries, TSMC, and Intel invest billions of dollars in the new technologies, new nodes, and despite the investments some transitions go wrong. The most recent example is the transition from 28nm to 20nm manufacturing, which was was delayed by almost two years.

TSMC and Samsung have started manufacturing low-power A8 processors for Apple, while Samsung has some of its Exynos chips in 20nm. Qualcomm is getting its first Snapdragon 810 20nm chips as we speak and we expect vendors to start shipping devices based on the new chip in March.

We have learned that high performance discrete GPUs will never make it to 20nm, simply as process has too much power leaks and poor yields with big cores. The GPU industry will move to 16nm FinFET at TSMC in 2016, or 14nm with Samsung and GlobalFoundries at about the same time. After 16nm FinFET, TSMC is planning to transition to 10nm as early as late 2016, but we believe that this is very optimistic timing.

A $16 billion investment may sound like a lot of money, but Intel has invested more than $6 billion in Israel based fabs since 2006. Intel is right now preparing Israel fabs for 10nm, while Ireland is manufacturing most of Intel's 14nm SoCs right now. The next node after 10nm for Intel is 7nm, probably happening before the end of this decade.

Back in 2009 in Albany, New York state, GlobalFoundries executives and chaps from The College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering were telling us that each transition cost to a new node grows exponentially. Despite large R&D investments, it is getting harder to transition from 28nm to 20nm to 14nm. This is one of the reasons why Samsung and GlobalFoundries have joined forces for their 14nm push.

It looks like 2015 iPhones will be getting 14nm SoC chips manufactured by Samsung and GlobalFoundries.

Since TSMC won most of the A8 20nm business and Samsung got roughly third of it, it looks like the tables will turn in 2015.

Samsung / GlobalFoundries might be winning most of the A9 business with their 14nm FinFET manufacturing technology. TSMC thinks that not all is lost, as its 16nm FinFET processes (16FF and 16FF+) is shaping up to be quite competitive.

The new Integrated fan-out (InFO) wafer-level packaging (WLP) technology might be something that will prompt Apple to reconsider its decision and bring it back to TSMC for its future A10 processors in 2016. The combination of InFO-WLP and FinFET process might help TSMC to compete for Apple's A10 chip orders, at least this is what sources in Taiwan claim.

InFO-WLP the new way of packaging is a cheaper alternative to TSMC's existing CoWoS (chip on wafer on substrate) packaging, a technology that is used by most SoC manufacturers. The cost of TSMC's InFO-WLP higher than the competing flip-chip chip-scale packaging (FC-CSP), according to sources at IC design technology, but it has its benefits.

TSMC plans to use InFO-WLP with 16nm FinFet and future 10nm manufacturing process. Let's just hope that 16nm transition will play out better than the 20nm, as we need smaller chip with lower consumption to get SoCs to a level of performance that will enable next-generation features on mobile devices, without having to increase battery capacity and obviously the size of the devices.

TSMC’s next generation 16nm process has reached an important milestone – 16nm FinFET Plus (16FF+) is now in risk production.

Needless to say, 16FF+ comes a few quarters after the 16nm rollout, expected in Q1 2015. TSMC hopes to start churning out 50,000 16FF wafers in Q2 2015. As for the Plus process, it is still more than a year away in terms of availability and it will be followed by 10nm, which is expected to materialise in late 2016.

TSMC says the improved 16FF+ process can deliver a 40% performance boost compared to its planar 20nm SoC process (20SoC), with a 50% reduction in power consumption.

"Our successful ramp-up in 20SoC has blazed a trail for 16FF and 16FF+, allowing us to rapidly offer a highly competitive technology to achieve maximum value for customers' products," said Mark Liu, president and Co-CEO for TSMC.

"We believe this new process can provide our customers the right balance between performance and cost so they can best meet their design requirements and time-to-market goals."

The first 16FF+ chips are expected to tape out in late 2015 and TSMC expects the volume ramp will start in mid-2015.

It looks like we might never see 20nm GPUs from either Nvidia or AMD. From what we know, both companies spent a lot of time looking into the new 20nm manufacturing process and they have decided that it is simply not viable for GPUs.

Yields are not where they are supposed to be and from a business perspective it doesn’t make sense to design and produce chips that would end up with very low yields. At this point we do not expect to see any high-end chips in 20nm, as there are obvious manufacturing obstacles and both companies might even skip the 20nm process altogether and move directly to 16nm FinFET.

16nm FinFET GPUs coming in 2016

We expect 16nm FinFET based GPUs sometime 2016 and this manufacturing process will bring some rather innovative products worthy of an upgrade.

One might ask why Apple doesn’t appear to have problems with its 20nm A8 and A8X chips and we might have a partial answer for you. The Apple A8 chip has to stay under 2.5W TDP, the A8X used in the iPad Air 2 A8X has a maximum TDP of 4.5W.

GPUs such as Maxwell- and Hawaii-based parts used in the Geforce GTX 980 and Radeon R9 290X have TDPs in the 150-250W range and the size of the modern GPU is an order of magnitude bigger than the size of an iPhone SoC.

Die size conundrum

The Apple A8 has a die size of 89mm2 and while we can only assume that the more powerful A8X measures over 100 mm2. Nvidia’s 28nm Maxwell GM204 die measures 398 mm2, which is about four and a half times bigger in terms of sheer die size.

To put things in perspective, in a single 20nm 300mm wafer you can place more than 700 A8 dies, while Nvidia can get about 140 Maxwell 204 chips from a 28nm High K 300 mm wafer and in 20nm manufacturing it would be able to get more, as the individual die would be significantly smaller.

However, these 150-250W chips are completely different than low-power SoCs with TDPs of less than 5W. They are worlds apart and one can assume that with the high performance and clock of discrete GPUs, coupled with their sheer size, result in higher leakage and other issues. Making a chip 4.5 times bigger means that there is much more room for potential issues, leakage and yield problems.

Don’t despair, 28nm still has some life in it

Not all is lost. We all saw that Nvidia pulled off a small miracle with the 28nm Maxwell GM204 chip, as this 5.2 billion transistor chip has a TDP of just 165W.

Its predecessor, the Geforce GTX 780 based on the GK110 chip, ended up with a 250W TDP with 7.08 billion transistors and a massive 561mm2 die size. Maxwell is also faster than Kepler, at least in this iteration, yet they are both 28nm products.

We expect that AMD’s upcoming Fiji GPU to be substantially more efficient than the Hawaii XT chip used in last year’s Radeon R9 290X. However, the new part is coming in 2015.

TSMC has announced that it will begin volume production of 16nm FinFET products in the second half of 2015, in late Q2 or early Q3.

For consumers, this means products based on TSMC 16nm FinFET silicon should appear in late 2015 and early 2016. The first TSMC 16nm FinFET product was announced a few weeks ago.

7-9% of revenue in Q4 2015

TSMC executive CC Wei said sales of 16nm FinFET products should account for 7-9% of the foundry's total revenue in Q4 2015. The company already has more than 60 clients lined up for the new process and it expects 16nm FinFET to be its fastest growing process ever.

Although TSMC is not talking about the actual clients, we already know the roster looks like the who's who of tech, with Qualcomm, AMD, Nvidia and Apple on board.

This also means the 20nm node will have a limited shelf life. The first 20nm products are rolling out as we speak, but the transition is slow and if TSMC sticks to its schedule, 20nm will be its top node for roughly a year, giving it much less time on top than earlier 28nm and 40nm nodes.

The road to 10nm

TSMC's 16nm FinFET, or 16FinFET, is just part of the story. The company hopes to tape out the first 10nm products in 2015, but there is no clear timeframe yet.

Volume production of 10nm products is slated for 2016, most likely late 2016. As transitions speed up, TSMC capex will go up. The company expects to invest more than $10bn in 2015, up from $9.6bn this year.

TSMC expects global smartphone shipments to reach 1.5bn units next year, up 19 percent year-on-year. Needless to say, TSMC silicon will power the majority of them.

Boba FinFETT Cortex-A57 at 2.3GHz

TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process (16FinFET or 16FF) is now in risk production. The companies collaborated to optimise ARM’s 64-bit ARMv8 processors designs for the new node.

The designs are now being optimised for TSMC’s improved 16FF+ process, which promises to deliver a 11% performance gain in the same power envelope for the A57 and a 35% reduction for the A53. The companies hope to finalise their work on 16FF+ optimisation by the end of the year.

The initial results for the first generation 16FF process are encouraging. The big Cortex A57 core manufactured in 16FF can achieve a sustained clock of 2.3GHz. It is backed by Cortex A53 cores running at the same clock and consuming an average of 75mW for most workloads.

Substantial gains for big.LITTLE designs

Pete Hutton, executive VP and president of ARM product groups, said the joint effort will eventually transform end-user experiences across the next generation of consumer devices and enterprise hardware.

"This silicon proof point with ARM Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 processors demonstrates the additional benefits in performance and power efficiency that 16nm FinFET technology delivers to big.LITTLE implementations," said Hutton.

Cliff Hou, VP of R&D at TSMC, said the company is proud to be the first foundry to validate an ARM big.LITTLE chip on 16nm technology. He said the collaboration with ARM will continue and the companies will strive to deliver market-leading SoCs for mobiles, servers and infrastructure applications using new nodes.

TSMC will start producing 16nm wafers in the first quarter of 2015. Sometime in the second quarter production should ramp up to 50,000 wafers a month.

The new FinFET process will be utilised for ARM SoCs. We still don’t have much information on 16nm GPUs. It is rumoured that Apple is one of TSMC’s major 16nm clients, possibly even the biggest client. However, there is also a possibility that Samsung will take over part of Apple’s business in late 2016, using the company’s 14nm node.

Other major clients for TSMC’s 16nm FinFET+ process include MediaTek and Qualcomm, along with smaller chip designers. At this point it appears that TSMC will transition to 10nm sometime in 2016, but there is no exact timeframe yet.

We asked around about ambitious plans coming out of Samsung and GlobalFoundries, as the chipmakers claim they can manufacture some 14nm parts before the end of the year. Some people who know the industry quite well are claiming that risk manufacturing can start later this year, but full volume production is definitely taking place in the latter half of 2015.

It takes time to transition from a manufacturing node and the general feeling is that industry will move from 20nm to 14nm much faster than it moved from 28th to 20nm.

FinFET transistors in 14nm/16nm are not easy to do and even Intel, the undisputed leader in the foundry business, is having trouble moving to 14nm production despite the fact that it mastered the 22nm process quite some time ago.

AMD’s 20nm, 14nm transition plan

AMD went on record saying that it plans 20nm parts next year and we expect to see both APUs and GPUs from this company in 20nm. We don’t know who will make them, TSMC or GlobalFoundries, or both. We would be surprised if all of AMD’s graphics business moves to GlobalFoundries, as TSMC has a lot of experience with big GPU designs, as it has been churning out GPUs for ATI (now AMD) and Nvidia since the first 3D accelerators back in the nineties.

Looking into our crystal ball, we see 16nm parts shipping in 2016 and if we are lucky we might even see some 16nm GPUs in the same year. Things are getting complicated as GlobalFoundries and Samsung calls their next node 14nm and the answer of whether the subsequent generation AMD parts will be 16nm or 14nm will depend on another answer – whether GlobalFoundries or TSMC have won the deal.

Our sources are also claiming that Apple wanted to get hold of Samsung and GlobalFoundries manufacturing capacities in USA. Samsung has the S2 Fab in Austin Texas, while GlobalFoundries have their new FAB 8 in Saratoga, New York State. Apple will be much happier to be able to manufacture its future chips closer to Cupertino.

Apple SoCs Designed in California, Made in USA

If all goes well the 2015 iPhone and iPad might end up with a 14nm custom SoC manufactured by the Samsung / GlobalFoundries alliance. According to the Samsung - GlobalFoundries 14nm collaboration presentation the performance of 14nm chip goes up 20 percent and the power consumption drops by about 35 percent. This is a big deal for battery operated devices.

With all we have gathered so far, we expect to see Apple A8 SoCs manufactured in 20nm in the latter half of 2014, just in time for the iPhone 6 and the next generation iPad launch. In 2015, Apple might be among first ARM licensees to start the 14nm chip production, manufactured on US soil.

TSMC has announced that it its new 16nm FinFET has entered risk production. Volume production should start sometime in the first quarter of 2015, so just over a year from now.

According to Co-CEO Mark Liu, volume production of 20nm parts is expected in January. The first 20nm products will apparently be SoC parts for the mobile industry. At this point we are not sure who will be the first outfit to roll out a 20nm SoC. The honour could go to Qualcomm, Nvidia, or a number of other players.

TSMC’s 28nm node remains the dominant process this year and it will generate about 23 percent of wafer sales in 2013.

Liu also noted that the foundry is trying to ramp up 16nm FinFET production ahead of schedule, but for the time being it is probably best to focus on upcoming 20nm products, namely GPUs and SoCs.